Opere

Emanuele Becheri Opere 30.11.2024 - 15.02.2025

CAR Gallery is pleased to host Opere, Emanuele Becheri’s first solo exhibition in Bologna. The artist presents a series of terracotta sculptures (that represent a synthesis of the research of the last year), two drawings on paper (made in the spring of this year), and a Testa also in terracotta that dates back to 2018.

For almost a decade, the artist has placed sculpture and drawing at the centre of his attention as dynamic terms of the same plastic motion: «The movements of drawing and sculpture - explains the artist - transmit to each other what favours the development of one and the other: the drawing is inscribed in the modelled clay as much as the sculpture in drawing». The artist emphasizes that «What matters in a sculpture are many things together, but it is what is released from the inside, what is not seen, the absence, that moves the gaze of the sculpture, that brings that piece of clay to life. In this sense, the sculptor’s struggle lies in not allowing the work to simply become an object».

The works he presents in the gallery are terracotta painted or “dusted” with pigments and oxides when the newly "modelled" clay is still fresh, attempts to incorporate painting with sculpture as happens in the technique of true fresco where the color is not superficial but literally petrified, entangled to become one with the masses.

Solitudine, Coppia, Figura and Testa are the titles of the subjects that the artist has been investigating in recent years. In this anthology of sculptures the artist has also chosen to exhibit two drawings that represent two self- portraits linked to a recent trip: in fact, the exhibition opens with a drawing on paper Study for Self-Portrait made in Amsterdam after having seen a painting by Frans Hals* in person at the Rijksmuseum and ideally closes with a Study for Self-Portrait, made after having seen the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

The self-portrait, which the artist has pursued since his debut and which he considers one of the centres of his poetics, «is not simply a genre of art history that is lost in the mists of time, it is rather a glimpse of the world, the artist’s gaze on those who come across it, a form of resistance to the passage of time».

- Text by Emanuele Becheri

*Portrait of Verdonck (1627, oil on canvas) by Frans Hals depicts a man holding a cow’s jawbone in the act of throwing it at us. In the nineteenth century, a wine glass was painted in place of the bone and it was called The Drinker, transforming the boldness of Hals’ composition into a harmless genre scene. At the same time, the disheveled hair was tamed by painting a bourgeois hat over it. But despite this overpainting, the face remained with the same features painted by Frans Hals, so much so that the underlying expressiveness led to the removal of the false symbols in 1927, revealing this man who looks at us and who even today, holding a “bone sickle” in his right hand, hammers the centuries. (Note by E. Becheri)